Overview

This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin's encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukacs's The Young Hegel and Marcuse's Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya's intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson's Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.

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9781988832753

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Reviews

Kevin Anderson's latest book is a staunch, comprehensive and accessible defense of dialectics. With the rise of popular and revolutionary upsurges in the last decade, a renewed interest in Marxism has been going on hand in hand with the lack of guiding material for dialectics, a vital component of Marxism. Anderson's Dialectics of Revolution constitutes an important step towards filling this gap.... Dialectics of Revolution is a masterful and clear study on dialectics, and a great guide for students of this vital component of Marxism. Yafumur Ali Co ukun in Marx and Philosophy Reviews, June 2021

Kevin Anderson's latest book is a staunch, comprehensive and accessible defense of dialectics. With the rise of popular and revolutionary upsurges in the last decade, a renewed interest in Marxism has been going on hand in hand with the lack of guiding material for dialectics, a vital component of Marxism. Anderson's Dialectics of Revolution constitutes an important step towards filling this gap.... Dialectics of Revolution is a masterful and clear study on dialectics, and a great guide for students of this vital component of Marxism. Yağmur Ali Coşkun in Marx and Philosophy Reviews, June 2021

Author Information

Kevin B. Anderson is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Feminist Studies and Political Science. A scholar-activist, he is the author or editor of over 10 books and also writes regularly for New Politics, The International Marxist-Humanist, and Jacobin on Marxism and on international politics and radical movements in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins (2010/2016). Among his edited volumes are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with Peter Hudis, 2004) and the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell, 2012).

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